Carly Rae Jepsen is well-regarded in the western pop musicscape as a music savant. She is very consistent with her projects, although she does have one magnum opus (Emotion is the album of the century, period blank), but she proved herself again and again that Emotion wasn’t a one-time fluke, delivering flawless and hard-to-dislike albums in the pop genre, where commerciality and mass appeal comes first more than anything. This makes her an anomaly, albeit a welcome and much-needed one, in the world of pop music.
That being said, it’s not difficult to see similarities between Carly and the K-pop name I mentioned in the title: fromis_9.
fromis_9 really does stand out amongst their contemporaries, not in part of the fact that they do have a myriad of hit singles (from Love Bomb and Feel Good, all the way to Vitamin ME), but due to the fact that they consistently deliver good to god-tier albums with some of the best songs K-pop to offer to the point that it feels both a blessing in the K-pop space to have a group like them, and a sin to have so many deep cuts that remain undiscovered by many.
Their earlier EPs did have solid to very great songs (Miracle, Pinocchio, 22nd Century Girl are standouts from their earlier discography), but they really amped it up starting from their 2020 comeback “Feel Good” (Pledis is yet to pay for the war crime they committed against this group for promoting them so poorly). Feel Good’s sound reverberates all the way to their recent songs, laying a groundwork for their future masterpieces (aka the song of all summers We Go, the Run Away With Me of K-pop DM, and the obviously Carly-inspired Like You Better).
But like I said, where fromis_9 really shines is within the deep cuts within their later discography. I do not need to speak further. Listen to the following songs (especially if you’re going to hear them for the first time): Mulgogi, Airplane Mode, 0g, Up And, Attitude, Beat the Heat, Merry-Go-Round, Eternal. Any other companies with a girl group would and WILL seal a deal with the devil to have just ONE of these songs in their discography, but they have TENS of them. The wild part? Those songs aren’t even from ONE album. They’re from different, separate albums. The wildest part? The other songs from the album where those songs come from are close to, if not just as, being good as those mentioned.
It’s insanely baffling to see how overlooked they are as a group and as artists. They sing really well (Jiwon and Hayoung being contenders for the best 4th gen vocalists but that’s a discussion for another day), dance well, have natural sense of comedy and variety. What’s even more upsetting, not as a Flover (fromis fan btw), but as an enjoyer of music, is how they are not as popular as other groups when they obliterate probably 95% of the industry music-wise.
I have to admit though, there is novelty in following a group like fromis_9 and an artist like Carly Rae Jepsen. I get to maintain this superiority complex that I listen to music with substance and structure (I’m looking at the brainrot music Hybe been putting out). May God bless the jury and judge that approved fromis_9 keep their name after escaping that hellish territory we call the basement of Pledis.
submitted by /u/ludanity
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